In a follow-up to my recent post, I want to discuss an often neglected element of online instruction; likely the most critical.

Let’s be honest, in the debate as to whether “online works,” MOOCs confused people. For those new to online, those (faculty) considering for the first time now that someone other than (for-profit/insignificant/not proper school) was doing it, they were the easiest online classes to access, and initially focused almost exclusively on slick content presentation. When people assessed MOOCs and then came back to assess (normal? traditional? retention-emphasized? credit-bearing) online courses they tend to ask for access to the course materials sans instructor or student activity. I’m yet to determine if this is merely an oversight, deference to the beast that is FERPA, or collegial respect for the sanctity of the classroom…

My team at Northeastern has experience gathered over more than 150 years working in and around online courses (there are 14 of us). The range of experience includes time at most of the leading online educators over the last one and a half decades. Even a quick sweep from my mental inventory brings up Drexel, Kaplan, UMass, SNHU, UNH, Capella, Boston University, Harvard / Harvard Extension and RISD. During our time together at NU, we have implemented the work of leading theorists in learning, and cognitive science, assessment, usability, self-efficacy, information architecture, multimedia design, graphics and as I write / you read, are experimenting with gamification and the challenge of intrinsically motivating underserved populations.

The work of people like Dick Clark (USC) and Bror Saxburg (Kaplan) has provided us with depth and detail on the evidence-based learning science behind a lot of our development work. We feel that we have clarity on what works in terms of content formatting (length of chunks, organization of media elements etc.) and of some behavioral elements – the importance of frequent, timely corrective feedback, the level of challenge required to keep students engaged. My team works directly with the full-time faculty trying to build in elements that approximate the type of learning that we have called Online Experiential Learning. Authentic, tangible experiences with opportunities to spiral back, reflect, abstract and re-apply case-based learning in a wider, retained for life context. We focus on, and sweat over, materials, formats, fonts, activities and assessments.

The feedback we receive includes: “I don’t care for the fonts” “or “I took a MOOC last week and their videos were really cool… can’t we do that?”
Colleagues who worked with me at smaller institutions (with even smaller budgets) will snigger at this but my budget is less than a tenth of what many MOOC providers have quoted us for production costs. That in itself may be misleading and counter to my point here (yes, I do have one…)… I have reviewed and developed courses that were superb, and superbly appreciated by demanding students who called them life altering. The reactions or conversely complaints rarely if ever center on the content. At one of my former institutions where we tracked student grievances we registered 4% of student complaints that were content-related; 96% focused on non-content concerns (read on…)

At a recent Bill and Melinda-Gates Institute hosted event I heard students respond to the ever-present question “Does online work?” or “Did it work for you?” Some replied enthusiastically and positively, others with quite definitive “No”s / “It was terrible”-type comments. This begs the key question: “What exactly did they hate?” Can you guess???? – the materials? the fonts? the quality of the videos? No, no and no. The comments fell into three consistent buckets:

“The online class was terrible because I got no feedback on my work”
“I didn’t ever really know how I was doing”
“The instructor was M.I.A.”

In other words, and either depressingly or reassuringly, depending on your perspective the juxtaposition of images and text as advocated by the learning science was not pivotal??? Hmm, OK – so here’s a question that I would pose to would-be online students: You have the choice of a great teacher with crappy materials or an absent / crappy teacher with great materials – which would you choose?

Students who self-select for an online class are in my experience, tolerant of technical glitches and they don’t really care if a video has the instructor in pajamas in front of family pictures in a poorly lit room. A responsive, attentive, responsive, empathetic, responsive, caring but challenging, responsive instructor more than offsets the fact that the video is not green screened so that (s)he appears to be in front of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, nor because Krakatoa’s not erupting right now* Their attention has gone after 6 minutes anyway, they don’t care whether “herds of Wildebeest are sweeping majestically across the plain”….

So, to summarize, we assess our collective sweat and tears in the realms of Instructional Design, Learning Science, Materials development, web usability, information architecture, Cognitive Science, Assessment specialists and Graphic art and are then judged by whether the instructor shows up for class or not? – Really?!

Imagine the same criteria for traditional classes: –

Q – “How was your face to face class today?”
A – “Well the instructor didn’t show so we all kind of read the books without direction and chatted amongst ourselves, but that’s fine, it was a great class. I love face-to-face classes.

Here’s my money-shot statement:

A class where the instructor does not devote energy and attention providing presence and guidance is not a failed class, it is a failed instructor.
It is not a rationale for concluding that a means of reaching hundreds of thousands of learners for whom face to face is not an option just doesn’t work.

To be clear, my intention in penning this is not at all to diss overstretched instructors who have themselves not self-selected to teach (see earlier comment on self-selected students). Teaching online is extremely different, not suited to all, can be learned but needs to be embraced (or at least a little bit hugged).

Who make the best online instructors?
Here’s a low-tech answer first:
• Jigsaw puzzlers who want to do 5-6 pieces at breakfast, coffee break, lunch, tea break and an hour or so before bed.
• Slightly obsessive gardeners who feel the need to check in on their tomato plants 4 times a day sometimes just to say “hi!”
A higher tech answer for 2014
• Committed e-bay-ers,
• Social media users (even moderate – parents / grandparents accessing Facebook to see progeny pics),
• Anyone who has ever felt the need to Advise TripAdvisor, then gone back to see if others rate their comments.
• Someone incentivized, by some inner passion, who gets a kick out of nudging things along incrementally. Someone who is a little compulsive and doesn’t like to think of a book misaligned on a shelf. Someone who has bought into the idea that they can have influence (on tomatoes or on travelers). Someone who gets a teeny bit jazzed at the thought that they could be just helping make the world a slightly more informed place, affecting or maybe even changing lives – sounds like a heck of a lot of the teachers I know.

It IS a transition though; teaching and changing lives in fifteen-minute increments, rather than through three-hour classroom performances between grading marathons.

Extending my not-great metaphors even further; does anyone garden in a half-assed manner so that they can prove that gardening doesn’t work? Does anyone eBay because they hate the whole system, which is an online manifestation of the capitalist marketplace, and vent when they sell (or buy) things?

I quite miss writing postcards when I travel, I was quite known for them back in the day (OK, I am old), but it is kind of cool now that I can let 20 times as many people know that I’m in a very cool (or hot) spot and also that they know before the week’s out. Change makes things different. If anyone is so wedded to the traditional that they can’t move – that’s fine. I remember hearing of an instructor at another of my former colleges who eschewed the phone as it was too new-fangled and he needed to see whites of eyes.
I get that. I miss things too. Instructors who dislike or distrust (whatever the rationale) “class” too much to show up should not be given online teaching assignments (surely). Those who are a fit and who get it in its slightly compulsive glory (eBayers, Facebookers, TripAdvisors, / Jigsawers, Tomato-growers or book-aligners) should be supported and cherished. Not every personality makes a good face-to-face instructor, not every personality makes a good online instructor. There is the choice; change, adapt, give it a genuine try, or (simply) don’t take the assignment

My job and the job of the Instructional Designers I work with should be supporting great instruction and genuine effort with appropriate spaces and backdrops for learning to happen. My job can’t be developing materials that substitute for instructors who don’t want to be there and don’t show up for class.

I know that academia is a big ship to turnaround but I wish there was a way to convince instructors that the most important thing in an online class IS STILL YOU. If people like me do our jobs well, we can automate some parts – but PLEASE work with us – we might even be able to take away the boring, dull parts that you don’t like doing. For example:
• Answering questions that you have answered 5000 times before (boom! – a FAQ),
• Reminding people that assignments are due (boom ! (again) – Calendar),
• Developing a working understanding of basic, underpinning knowledge (chunked content and Check Your Knowledge self-checks)
• Being there 24/7, answering every question (let us show you scaffolded, supported peer-to-peer interaction).
I now pronounce you FREE to only have to focus on questions that are stimulating, that allow you to demonstrate and indulge your passion for your subject and engage (disproportionately) through interactions that are significant and (could) change lives. I wrote an earlier blog post on this two years ago titled Disrupted Faculty Roles

In summary:
An online class that is poor because the instructor didn’t show up is

a poor class led by a delinquent instructor.

If an institution does nothing about it, turns away from the data that demonstrates it or deflects blame towards materials that aren’t as cool as the latest MOOC, shame on it/them/us.

Online works for a lot of people when planets align and people work together. The instructor’s responsiveness should be close to the top, rather than near the bottom of the list of requirements.

As I said, work with us, then show up for class… in pajamas, eating tomatoes.

The subject of the discussion I participated in at the Ohio Confederation of Teacher Education Organizations (OCTEO) was “Why MOOCS, why now?” – on a panel including Susan Delagrange, English professor / MOOC-er from The Ohio State University and Larry Johnson, CAO for the University of Cincinnati.

My talking points were:

Now is a great time to be having this discussion – we’ve been through the hype and the post-hype let down, now is the time to coldly evaluate what is/was great about the MOOC concept, and what else is out there (technology / pedagogy-wise) that could be added to the mix to meet institutional goals.

MOOCs at least originally were not tasked with effectively addressing community-building, secure assessment or persistence / completion.

There are other means to meld elements of MOOCs with solid-great work that has been done over the last 15-20 years by Instructional Designers and Innovators in the field; the esteemed Chris Sessums (keynote in the morning prior to my session) being one of them.

We must be very aware of our target audience – demographic, prior exposure to higher education (successes / failures etc) when we decide on institutional strategy.

Fragile / post-traditional learners will not persist in a MOOC environment without comprehensive support and a boatload of intrinsic motivation addressed as part of the course build. “We can scale content, we can’t scale encouragement” (George Siemens)

I quoted from Richard Garrett’s recent post Google, EdX and MOOC.org: Addressing the problem or making it worse? specifically “If the consumers most in need of education innovation are the mass of under-prepared high school graduates or working adults, the students least familiar to schools involved in EdX, having EdX take the lead seems wrongheaded. Equally, EdX schools are not in the business of disrupting themselves, and are least open to and least in need of pedagogic reform.”

This was intended as encouragement – great discussions like those hosted this week in Columbus, OH among motivated practitioners are exactly what is needed to develop the next round of effective online courses. These courses should be Effective, Scalable and Evidence-based, cognizant of the latest pedagogies, leveraging technology, open resources and peer-to-peer activities.

The productive discussion evolved from “MOOCs – why now?” to “Who do we want to support through online/hybrid programming and how do we do that at scale?” The MOOC guys have learned a lot from their initial work – we should all be hugely appreciative of the way MOOCs have pushed the conversations front and center – elements have changed the game – now’s a great time for more discussion.

Thanks for the invite OCTEO stay in touch – this blog, Twitter kbell14 or Link’d in – whatever works

I note that my last three posts have all been about MOOCs. I think I’m MOOC-d out, although the combination of the M-word and the V-word (Virginia – as in University of) have, for me, totally confirmed that Higher Ed. change is afoot. There can be no turning back. Stuff is happening, things are changing, the only real question that remains as far as I see it, is What’s stopping us all really hitting SEND?

The UVa case brings up the G-word – Governance: more pertinently preceded with the word Shared. Shared Governance; the amazing concept that people with totally different agendas, world views and degrees of ethos, will collaborate collegially and set the course for their institutions according to their bylaws, history and mission. On that front my advice to a newcomer to an institution would be simply: work out how it works – in all its dysfunctional glory. If the real discussions happen around the water cooler or at the football field – be there. If the provost’s admin assistant is the real power broker on campus and donuts get you in her good books, go Dunkin’ on her/him. Whatever it takes…

Governance is impervious to being fixed. Somehow it works and no degree of AAU guidance will make it uniform or rational. A university’s governance works only at that university. Where one university takes 12 minutes to approve a new concept, another may take 12 years. Good concepts that genuinely benefit the institution (academically, fiscally, politically, aesthetically) all will go through. Some will lead, others will follow, a few will kick, scream and moan about how it was way better in a mythical golden age. Deal with that – you signed up to be Associate Vice President For Innovative New Ventures and Annoying the Faculty – now make it work…

So – I think I’m saying that all change is possible while nothing is simple. Given that, let’s take on a decent challenge. Not technology, not price, not incrementally changing senior administrators, not that life isn’t fair as MIT have deeper pockets. Let’s take on Credits. In my opinion Credits are the enemy.

Credits are artificial packages of pretend competencies. They are charged at way too high a rate, they complicate transfers, they encourage academic silos and they prove nothing or worth to employers or society at large. They are a means of billing, price inflation and encapsulate all that is wrong and inefficient in higher education – Credits are evil.

Employers don’t look at credits – they look at the degree. They don’t want the pretend competencies that 3 or 4 credits supposedly represent, they want real competencies. In a traditional general ed. program the credit boundaries simply dissuade collaboration and the creation of efficiencies between departments and hence for students.

Look at Lumina, LEAP, The Institute of the Future and almost any organization that has analyzed critical skills needed in 2020 society, and you’ll see remarkable alignment around six or seven key elements.

Look carefully at academic undergraduate / associates level syllabi in terms of (when you scratch the surface) how many courses and faculty do actually have these elements addressed. If I were a student looking to master these key skills I might query why having demonstrated that I am a brilliant critical thinker in FIVE classes, do I need to keep jumping through that same hoop, again and again, in a sixth, then a seventh, often in new contexts, evaluated in incrementally different ways by first a historian, then by a mathematics instructor, then by a lit. professor?

Unbundling syllabi with their (often) poorly written learning outcomes and aligning concrete materials with focused assessments provides the context and connections for improved learning. Independent graders and/or standardized tests can confirm that students REALLY DO GET these core elements. Separating curriculum from term times would mean that students can practice then demonstrate competencies clearly and repeatedly at their own pace, building on prior learning, working in areas that provide intrinsic motivation for them personally. It is super that in a typical Gen Ed / General Studies course students will be exposed to the literary giants and will learn (some) key dates in the history of Rome? Europe? The US? (as dictated by faculty whim), but isn’t the bigger goal the competencies? What will make the student succeed in the world? If (s)he is able to develop passions for certain aspects of the general curriculum then that’s great but realistically they don’t have to be passionate about every aspect that a Gen Ed committee patches together to placate seven different departments.

Compare and contrast: as a provider of education which is a better “product”? One where you separate out essential skills, provide practice, feedback around those key competencies (the 6 listed above). And when all are done –a degree that really reflects a valuable skill-set. No more having to graduate the student who hung around for six years and wearied enough faculty members to be shuffled off with a number of credits – maybe not even enough to amount to a qualification, tens of thousands of dollars in the hole.

A focus on credits mean high charges, slow pace, and inefficiencies.
A focus on competencies allows for greater efficiency, leverage of prior learning, real support, real achievement and clear motivation (these skills will help me in my career and in my life).

Employers will still see a degree from institute X, the pleasant surprise will be that it will represent a skill-set rather than a worthless measure of endurance. Learning constant, time variable not the other way around.
Time to graduation, costs and inefficiencies all reduced, motivation, retention and actual competencies all up, registrars with less to worry about, faculty less angst-ridden having to pass students who haven’t really “got it”

Death to Credits! – makes true innovation feasible, even palatable, reduces barriers to change and heck, could even make MOOCs worth talking about (again).

One development that could inject new life into the dual-mode model is the Open Education Resource (OER) University that is being explored by a group of public universities from several countries. Open Educational Resources may prove to be the most disruptive element of the impact of eLearning in higher education. How might they help to widen access, cut costs and give dual-mode provision new relevance?

Some institutions are already encouraging the use of OER to avoid each teacher having to re-invent the wheel for each course. For example, once academics at the Asia eUniversity have developed course curricula they do not create any original learning materials, but simply adapt good quality OER from the web to their needs. Similarly, Athabasca University will only approve development of a course once those proposing it have done a thorough search for relevant open material that can be re-purposed.

Some would go much further. In February 2011 New Zealand’s Open Education Resource Foundation convened a meeting to operationalize the concept of the Open Educational Resource University. The idea is that students find their own content as OER; get tutoring from a global network of volunteers; are assessed, for a fee, by a participating institution; and earn a credible credential. The concept has echoes of the University of London External System that innovated radically 150 years ago by declaring that all that mattered was performance in examinations, not how students acquired their knowledge.

Clearly I am connecting with Mindflash today on many levels. David Kelly has a great post on What Angry Birds can tell us about Instructional Design. If you only have 1 minute to skim his paragraph headings do so – I agree 100% – as evidence see my many posts and the fact that many colleagues roll their eyes as I have discussed gamification (game principles rather than simulations) one too many times over the last couple of years…

I blogged about this a while back – how the instructor role can be reinvented, rather than threatened by effective application of technology and process.
I was, obviously, more focused on an online or hybrid class environment, but I believe the same applies to instructors who embrace, rather than run from, elements that allow them to focus on the “what’s really cool about teaching (andlearning)…. insert discipline here”Ian Stewart’s post today references instructors who value class time so highly that they would not dream of doing drill and kill or lecturing to a passive audience.
He writes: “By focusing that valuable face-to-face classroom time on exercises that put the lessons learned during lectures into actual practice (doing the homework at school), instructors are supporting the part of the learning process (the “doing”) that students really retain. That is, since students learn the most by implementing theories they’ve learned into real-life work, it makes sense to use as much of your 50-minute in-person session on that as possible.”

My recent work at SNHU has been focused on what we’ve called transitional text that is going to help provide students with the guidance and hopefully some of the impetus to get them from OER resource #1 to #2 and #27, then back to take a self-check quiz or post an assignment. Interesting (flow-inducing) resources and the students’ own intrinsic motivation may get some of them down that path to success, but the main? challenge for online can, and indeed should, be how to convey that passion that a true scholar in the field has developed – how to ignite the fire, illustrate the end point, and viscerally engage the drowsing? student…

Stewart, in what is looking like a pact among Scottish-sounding ed-theorists, references Andrew Miller, who writes that a “flipped” classroom still requires instructors to demonstrate the value of their content, whether online or offline. “Just because I record something, or use a recorded material, does not mean that my students will want to watch, nor see the relevance in watching it,” he writes. ” … If the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason[s] to know the content.”

Both these posts confirm for me that there is a great opportunity in “unbundling” the instructor role – allowing technology and online (peer-to-peer) communities to deal with some of the things that they can take off an instructor’s plate, allowing her/him the chance to get back to inspiring, motivating and Captain-my-captain-ing.

David Wiley recently posted an article on the challenge of assessment in the OER world. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2042
It certainly does seem to be a challenge – we (SNHU Innovation team) spent time with ETS at their Higher Ed Advisory Council last week in San Diego where we had some great break-out discussions around standardized testing. It was a great session; they have some VERY smart employees in Princeton (special mentions for Ross, Patrick, Kate and David) and they convened a very interesting group of academics.

The current assessment choice for those of us working in the OER space seems to be:

on one hand, multiple choice / self-checks – with no concrete feedback from humans (many OER courses have these included)

on the other – blog / journal reviews which are time-consuming (hence questionable given scaling aspirations), subjective, organization-specific, open to inflation, bias and inconsistent leveling.

I appreciated the Vision Project’s* working group March 2011 report on Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment which I think frames the issue very clearly (the bold is my highlight)

If colleges and universities … are to devise a system for assessing the learning outcomes of their undergraduates in a way that allows for comparability, transparency, and accountability, we must agree on some of the qualities of an undergraduate education that we all expect our students to possess. At the same time, those qualities we agree on must allow us to preserve the unique missions of individual colleges, appropriate measures of privacy around assessment work, and an ability to actually improve teaching and learning with the results that we find.Research and literature on sound assessment practice is clear that no single instrument or approach to assessing learning can meet all of the challenges and notes that the most effective systemic models of assessment offer multiple measures of student learning in a triangulation approach. The most effective systemic models of assessment offer multiple measures of student learning in a “triangulation” approach that includes indirect assessments such as surveys, direct assessments like tests, and embedded assessments such as classroom assignments.

This notion of triangulation seems viable – mixing in institutional (mission-related) emphases, with quick turnaround self-checks. The missing (third) element is the industry-standard independent test. In some disciplines – Project Management (PMI), IT (Microsoft), HR (PHR, SPHR) there are clear standards that can be applied. There is certainly a window of opportunity for someone like ETS to take a lead on this, if they can develop the adaptability of development and pricing that we, and other college partners, would likely need. I hope that as colleges free up Instructional Design time that they would typically have been spending making *another* version of PSYCH101 content (which is freely available and wonderful at Saylor.org), they spend more time on developing key benchmarks for assessment that can become more widely disseminated.

Assessment is indeed the golden bullet for this work. Ideally it’s fun too.

* The Working Group on Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment (WGSLOA) was established by Richard Freeland, Commissioner of Higher Education, in late fall 2009 in anticipation of the Vision Project, a bold effort to set a public agenda for higher education and commit public campuses and the Department/Board of Higher Education to producing nationally leading educational results at a time when the need for well-educated citizens and a well- prepared workforce is critical for the future of the Commonwealth.